


the green ray

by zetaophiuchi (ryuujitsu)



Category: SKAM (France), SKAM (TV) RPF
Genre: Character Bleed, M/M, Pining, RPF, maxel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-03
Updated: 2019-07-03
Packaged: 2020-06-03 02:53:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19454833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryuujitsu/pseuds/zetaophiuchi
Summary: He wonders how Axel is able to do it, to date his girlfriend and move on, compartmentalize himself, zip Lucas away like a winter coat going into storage. Maybe it’s because Axel is young, Maxence thinks, and then he snorts at himself. As though he’s old: he’s only twenty-six; there are many loves ahead of him, he’s sure, and yet. And yet.





	the green ray

**Author's Note:**

>   * "'The Green Ray' refers to a meteorological phenomenon—the flash of light that emanates from the sunset on a very clear day. Delphine overhears a group of older tourists analyzing Jules Verne’s 1882 novel of the same name. (In that novel, a young girl becomes obsessed with glimpsing the green ray, which, she believes, will grant her the power to understand her own feelings and the feelings of those around her. In the end, the elusive ray appears on the horizon, but she and her lover are too busy looking at one another to notice.)" —"[The Strange, Enduring Appeal of Biarritz](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/t-magazine/biarritz-eric-rohmer-green-ray.html)" ( _New York Times_ , May 14, 2018)
>   * <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_flash>
> 


He kisses Axel on the mouth every time they meet, until the day after filming ends, when Axel veers to the right and doesn’t even brush his cheek, just hovers. Axel’s hands are on his shoulders, holding him at arm’s length. Remembering with a start how friends are supposed to greet each other, he gives Axel a little squeeze on the bicep and makes a kissing sound into thin air.

Of course, he thinks. It’s over now.

He’s grateful for the Voldemort project at first, for something totally different, a sinister persona, someone new to inhabit. But Tom Jedusor is a fantasy, a cartoonish noseless villain. Eliott is real. Eliott has walked the streets of Paris, worn his clothes.

He doesn’t understand how Axel does it, leaping seamlessly from character to character, stage to stage, sometimes multiple times within a single day. Meanwhile, every morning, he wakes up slowly and spends an hour in the bathroom bewildered by his reflection. Like an insurance agent he takes account of everything, working through a checklist: Eliott’s eyes, Eliott’s hair, Eliott’s mouth. Eliott’s fingers coming up to Eliott’s face, probing cautiously at Eliott’s lips. He pierces his ear to remind himself: this is your ear, you, Maxence. Eventually, he cuts his hair, too. Even dyed black, it was too much like Eliott’s hair for comfort.

But still he doesn’t recognize himself. The man in the mirror, yes, the bald one with a glittering earlobe, who is that?

When he goes out, he disguises himself with hats, so that the person he sees reflected in the glass of shop windows out of the corner of his eye is a stranger, neither Eliott nor Maxence. He buys new shirts, garishly printed ones, that neither Eliott nor Maxence would wear. He listens to Felix Laband, screaming out into calm Parisian afternoons and evenings: _I have decided to take out my eyes._

He tries not to think. Gets drunk. Gets high. Goes to concerts with friends. Spends five days at a festival, so stoned he can’t feel his face. When it’s over, he sleeps for another day and a half, dreaming about New York, about peanut M&Ms and vomit, about dust and gasoline and paint on his teeth. And then he goes back to work.

Gradually, he notices that his tastes have changed. He reads the books that Axel reads, eats the foods that Axel eats. Memoirs, nonfiction, strange scripts, white wine, terrines, potato chips in weird flavors, pizzas. A pink ice cream with cherry halves and little flecks of chocolate in it; he remembers Axel saying it was a favorite. One day he finds himself putting on a pair of enormous white sneakers, so puffy they could be moonboots. They cover his ankles. They are hideous. He wears them outside.

“What’s going on with you?” his sister says.

When he arrived at the café twenty minutes ago, she’d set her coffee down with theatrical slowness, looking him from head to toe. _Are you robbing banks now?_ she said, waving her hand toward her own forehead. _Take that thing off. I thought the point was to be incognito. Is this what passes for fashion, wool hats in forty degree weather?_

As he pocketed the beanie and wiped the sweat from his forehead, he thought about how Axel had called him Jacques Cousteau and laughed that belly laugh of his. Wide mouth, white teeth. _Get a red one, you look good in red._

“Eh, what?” he says, and his sister repeats her question.

“I’m studying,” he replies.

“Oh, yeah?” she says. “Did you get a new role?”

He wants to say yes. He considers inventing a character on the spot and squints at the sidewalk of the seventh arrondissement in search of inspiration: it is blank, grainy, and useless, beaten into a white-hot expanse by the sun. A pair of students walk by in tank tops and sneakers, shoulders burned pink, the outlines of their bodies wavering in the heat. He imagines Lucas and Eliott in their places, holding hands.

“A play,” his sister guesses; she always likes to guess, and usually Maxence enjoys dropping hints, striking poses, making faces. “A one-man show, the kind Axel likes to do. In fact, I bet Axel hooked you up. Am I getting warmer? Did Axel—”

Like a victim of the Inquisition he writhes and cries out a truth, any truth, to stop the onslaught.

“No,” he blurts. “No new role, no, but no, please, that’s ridiculous.”

She looks at him doubtfully. Maxence avoids her eyes. He sucks at his café au lait and reroutes the discussion to Harry Potter.

She saw through him then, at that moment, she tells him later. The moment he pressed his lips together and glanced down, looking hunted, she knew. Before he even knew himself, in the weeks while he was still eating cherry ice cream and making a study of Axel’s mouth in photos and Instagram stories and telling himself it was purely artistic interest in a mouth so plastic, so expressive. He didn’t have to wonder what it would be like to kiss it; he’d done that already, time and time again, with pleasure.

“Knew what,” he says, defeated. They are together in his apartment, in the kitchen, with the photos of the cast and Polaroids of himself and his other friends, of Simon, of J.F., taped to the door.

“Tell him how you feel about him,” she says. “You have to work together again for season five. Say something before you burst.”

“The season isn’t about us,” he says. “It’s about Robin. About Arthur, I mean.”

“So?”

“So we’ll barely interact,” he says. “I can control myself. I’m a professional. I won’t _burst_.”

“And when your season comes?”

“ _If_ ,” he says. Then he mutters against the lip of his beer that maybe he and Lucas will break up.

“Tell him,” his sister urges.

“He already knows,” Maxence says. He knows, and he is building a wall between us, a wall of pictures of a beautiful girl in beautiful places. _It’s normal, Maxence, it happens, it will pass. Look: it has passed, already, for me._

He wonders how Axel is able to do it, to date his girlfriend and move on, compartmentalize himself, zip Lucas away like a winter coat going into storage. Maybe it’s because Axel is young, Maxence thinks, and then he snorts at himself. As though he’s old: he’s only twenty-six; there are many loves ahead of him, he’s sure, and yet. And yet.

At Pride, he tries to read Axel like the leaves at the bottom of a teacup or the stars in the sky, faraway pinpricks of light gathered into new constellations, looking for any sign, any lingering stare or touch or intake of breath, flicker of the eyes, biting of the lip. There is nothing, and it’s almost too hot to feel amorous, anyway. He drinks and talks, talks and drinks, shouts in delight when the march takes them into a mist of water, and becomes horribly sunburned.

They won’t spend the night together, not even a portion of the evening. It’s enough, isn’t it, to have been photographed together, and filmed, and interviewed? In thirty minutes, Maxence has to meet his friends at a bar, and Axel has to pack. He’s going to Avignon on Monday, on a train that will leave at eight in the morning.

On Monday, at a more reasonable hour, Maxence will go to Biarritz: J.F., sensing his despair, without really understanding its cause, has promised a week-long getaway.

 _Not Avignon_ , he’d begged.

 _I thought you liked my family?_ J.F. said. _My grandmother will cook for us, there’s the festival…my uncle and his motorcycle…_

 _Yes, of course, but it’s too grim, too cramped, the scenery, the architecture…I want to go to the seaside. Biarritz_ , he said, wildly, remembering _The Green Ray_ , the deep filmy greens of certain long shots and powerful ocean waves and that flash, that elusive green flash, at sunset. _Biarritz, let’s go to Biarritz._

_Biarritz! That’ll be cramped too, fuck._

_Please._

Right now, the sidewalk is shadowed blue with impending night, pockmarked with trampled confetti, and apocalyptically empty in the aftermath of the parade.

“When are you going to take me to Disney Paris, hm?” he jokes.

He means it as a parting remark, to be thrown over the shoulder as he saunters off in search of a frosted bottle of Abbaye de Vauclair Rubis, but his feet disobey. He stays rooted to the ground in the growing dusk, like a lamppost or bus stop, an immovable urban fixture. Run your hand over me, sit on me, interact with me. Or walk by in the darkness, unseeing.

“You?” Axel says, and then his brow clears, and he says, “Oh, Eliott. Message David, maybe he and Niels can work it in. Disney, I’d like that, sure. They’ll put you in a Mickey hat. Do you think Eliott likes rollercoasters?”

“He adores them, it’s like flying,” Maxence says immediately. “And at the same time, they satisfy a morbid interest. At any moment, he thinks, something could go wrong.” He winks. “I bet Lucas is terrified of them.”

“Lucas has gained the courage to do many things,” Axel says. No flicker, no challenge, just a wide, open grin, a blue, open, unblinking stare. “Since meeting you.”

 _Who’s to say_ , Axel said earlier to their interviewer, _that we haven’t or won’t ever love a man?_

 _I have loved,_ the stare says now, _and my love continues._

He has to smile. How can he not smile?

“Living his best life,” he says.

“That’s right.”

“Have fun in Avignon,” he says, as calm as can be over the pounding of his heart.

“I will,” Axel says, and Maxence knows he means it. He does not promise: he declares. “And you too, have fun, wherever it is you’ll be.”

“Biarritz,” he says. “We decided this morning.”

“Amazing,” Axel says. Maxence sees the sea in his eyes, blue and vast, with the sparkle of a white gull in the distance. “Tell me you’re going to go to at least one performance. At Chimères, maybe?”

“Probably not. We’re going to lie on the beach and pretend to be seals,” Maxence says. “We’ll lie around and look for the green ray.”

“The what?” Axel says. He’s distracted. “You’ll be so tanned by the time we start filming.”

His gaze slides down Maxence’s chest as he says it, dipping between the edges of Maxence’s shirt that are gaping open like a set of curtains, and Maxence can tell that he’s imagining it, the glow of sun on his skin.

Maybe this is what galvanizes him, or maybe he forgets himself, but this time, when at last the conversation dwindles and they begin to say their goodbyes, he kisses Axel on the mouth. He does it without thinking, the most natural thing in the world.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Metà di voi qua vadano | Half of you go that way | Que la moitié d'entre vous aille par là](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19701742) by [FLWhite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FLWhite/pseuds/FLWhite)




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